CMO Survey Shows Marketing Budget and Hiring Trends

Every year the CMO Survey is produced by Christine Moorman who is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. I put the credentials at the top of this post to indicate that this information is coming from one of the most respected business schools in the world. This hopefully keeps the likelihood of “research as PR syndrome” to a minimum.

That said, the February 2012 CMO Survey (which you can get here in PDF form without filling out anything) is pretty fascinating. It shows that CMO’s are optimistic about the economy while also showing that it is important to break down this analysis into 4 sectors of B2B and B2C Products or Services to truly see who is the happiest of the bunch (spoiler alert: it’s B2B marketers).

Budgets are increasing although there is a bit of a drop from the numbers of last August.

What is interesting is that despite this increase in budgets there is not a rush to hire additional staff. One note to consider is that with the phasing out of more traditional marketing elements the need for digital specialists is there but CMO’s could be looking for existing employees to pick up the digital skills because they have something that most young new hires will not which is industry and particular company experience. That’s valuable. Here is the data on hiring. As you can see, outside of B2B services there is a considerable drop in hiring planned from the August 2011 survey.

The survey is very comprehensive (I do recommend you take a closer look because there is a ton of insight in the survey as a whole) and does a great job of showing the view of the marketing world from the top seat in larger companies. Does this data translate to the smaller companies that make up the vast majority of businesses in the US? That’s something that only those businesses and their stakeholders can answer.